Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I will be brief because I know we want to return to Amendment 12 in the previous group. I can assure your Lordships that I do not intend to make a valedictory speech about all the issues we have talked about during the course of this Bill.

However, this Bill is extraordinarily constructed. Where there is a direct route to one of the Government’s objectives, they have gone the long way round to do it. It is almost as if someone walking from your Lordships’ House to the Supreme Court decided to go up Whitehall, via Trafalgar Square, along the Mall and down Birdcage Walk to get there rather than simply crossing Parliament Square. There are two instances of that: first, the strange decision to use the concept of corporation sole as the mechanism for chief officers of police and for police and crime commissioners; and, secondly, the decision to insist on duplicate financial and audit systems, neither of which are necessary to achieve the Government’s objectives. They are simply going the long way round.

As we have discussed repeatedly during the course of this Bill, corporation sole is a medieval construct designed to prevent priests ripping money off the mother church. It has occasionally been used as a construct in terms of public policy in this country, most recently by the Children’s Commissioner. However, in the recent review, the Children’s Commissioner has made clear that the mechanism is unsatisfactory; it does not allow proper governance and is not particularly robust or transparent. Yet this is the mechanism the Government are using in terms of chief officers of police and police and crime commissioners. Frankly, that is a bizarre way of doing it. That also gets to the heart of the problem of this Bill, which is whether there will be adequate governance around the position of police and crime commissioners and whether there will be the adequate checks and balances that I know Liberal Democrat and many Members of your Lordships’ House are so concerned about. It gets to the heart of that principle because it does not facilitate good governance; it is a single individual making decisions alone. That is why it is called a corporation sole.

The second issue concerns having two chief financial officers, both of which will be subject to audit regulations. I have a letter from the Audit Commission which confirms that the Bill requires that both the chief officer of police’s chief financial officer and the chief financial officer of the police and crime commissioner will have to have separate auditors. There will have to be a separate audit opinion on separate financial statements, so the single police fund will be audited twice: once as it passes through the hands of the police and crime commissioner, and again as it passes through the chief finance officer of the chief constable. In fact, in London, it will be audited three times, because it has to pass through the hands of the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority; it then passes to the MOPC, who will have to have a chief financial officer and who will have to be separately audited with a separate audit function; and then it passes to the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis.

What a bizarre waste of public money. That is simply because it has not entered the Government's mind to go the shortest distance from one place to another. That is why we have this bizarre construct of corporations sole and chief financial officers. The amendment would require the Government to come back to Parliament with a proper explanation, which can be debated, as to why those bizarre routes have been taken to deliver what they want. That would give Parliament an opportunity to make the Government think again and put more sensible, transparent and accountable systems in place. I beg to move.

[Baroness Henig]

I very much support my noble friend's amendment. In the past few weeks, I have struggled hard to master the concept and practice of corporations sole and to understand the Government’s thinking in this area. I know that we were going to have a meeting about it with the Minister. I would have welcomed that so as to be able to tease out the problems and issues. Unfortunately, that could not take place, and I quite understand that.

My problem is that in this area, the Home Office often has a different view from police authority chief executives, the Audit Commission and other bodies. There is a range of views here: there is the Home Office view of how we should do things, and there are other people who have different views. The reason I have a problem with that is that I have many years of experience at national level of sitting on bodies dealing with the Home Office’s suggested way forward. In my experience, the Home Office sometimes gets things wrong—not always, but on occasion. On occasion, the Home Office can be very stubborn in denying that it gets things wrong. Again, I have experience of that. I know that sometimes it can take years for the Home Office to accept that it has made a mistake and put it right. I am not saying that that happens all the time, but it happens.

In that light and in that spirit, I think that we need to pause. This is a very complex area, and I am not clear that the Government have got it right at the moment. My noble friend has put forward a serious argument and I hope that the Government are willing to consider it.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Monday 11th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I realise that we are stretching the rules of Report, but this is important. Presumably when the matter goes to the other place, we can receive back from them only amendments that relate to amendments passed by your Lordships' House. That will produce a very narrow range of areas. Areas on which there is no amendment from your Lordships' House will not be covered. I make this plea for the fourth time that it would be in the Government’s interests to postpone Third Reading on this Bill to 5 September. It would lose them only one parliamentary day, but it would enable the Home Office, the Minister’s officials and colleagues around the House to spend a little bit more time getting the details right. It would also give the Minister the opportunity to come back on some of these detailed points.

[Baroness Henig]

My Lords, I have suddenly realised that some days ago I moved an amendment, did I not, about statutory protection for chief executives, and withdrew it because the noble Baroness would not give me any assurances on this. Does this not rule out any changes? I am puzzled because I did move this amendment and, as I recall, it was rejected.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig]

I hear what the noble Lord says and I am sure that that is the case. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, has spoken up, as did the noble Baroness, but look at the record. As I say, if six Members on the government Benches—certainly, on the Conservative Benches—have spoken up in favour of the legislation, that is all and it is a very small number for a major change in policy.

It is not surprising to me that that is the case. How could the Benches opposite deny, for example, that party politics will play a much greater role in policing? That is so irrefutable that it cannot possibly be denied. How could they deny that chief constables are going to be subject to much greater pressure on policing issues, both operational and non-operational? No, they cannot refute that. People talk about a protocol but just consider some of the forceful Home Secretaries whom we have had in the past 10, 15 or 20 years. Now consider that some of those Home Secretaries might consider that being a commissioner would be a glorious end to a good parliamentary career. Just imagine some of them now as commissioners. I suggest to Members of this House that they are going to put their views to chief constables in a fairly forceful way.

We talk about “operational” and “non-operational” but, frankly, with that kind of expertise and forcefulness coming from those who could be commissioners in the next few years, chief constables will notice a great difference between the new regime and what they have been used to. They will be subject to greater pressures. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has already said, thus far we have seen few checks and balances on the powers of commissioners. I am not expecting to see many more, let alone strict checks and balances, so the case for pilots is very strong.

There are even greater arguments in favour of pilots. First, there was no pre-legislative scrutiny, which, for a change of this magnitude, there should have been. It would have made a big difference and a lot of the arguments which we have been having in the past few weeks would have been resolved at that stage. With a constitutional change of this magnitude, to have no pre-legislative scrutiny was, I believe, a great omission. That is one argument. We also know that there was a consultation by the Home Office and that there were over 900 responses. We have never been told how many of those responses favoured what was being proposed and how many opposed it. We can draw from not being told that the great majority of people who responded to the Home Office consultation were opposed. I assure the House that had they not been we would have heard that a great majority were in favour. That, again, is worrying.

As we have gone through the Bill in detail, some very tricky issues have emerged. We have not yet reached the issue of corporations sole, although we soon shall. I know my noble friend Lord Harris will entertain the House with a riveting account of corporations sole and all the difficulties that they will raise. We do not know how they will work. We know that they will lead to problems and to staff issues. That is one area of uncertainty. We know that relations between the commissioners and the PCPs are embryonic at this point in time. We do not know how these bodies will work together. We do not know how the PCPs will be best equipped to undertake scrutiny, not just of the commissioners but of the policing that is delivered in their locality. There has been a great reluctance to give panels the sort of powers that would enable them to have a much more constructive role than the one they have at the moment.

We also know that in some areas we will go back 20 years. For example, we know that there will be no lay involvement in the appointment of deputy chief constables and assistant chief constables. I am long enough in the tooth to remember that when chief constables made these appointments themselves there were enormous difficulties. I for one am not happy to go back 20 years in that regard—at least, not without seeing how it would play out.

We are also being asked to agree to this legislation when the national policing landscape is not yet complete. We do not know how things will play out nationally. We do not know what will replace the senior appointments panel, so we do not know how future candidates for chief officer appointments will come forward. We know nothing about that; there is a complete lack of information at the moment. The framework around senior police appointments is not yet in place. We are being asked to take it on trust. We have not seen any of this. For all those reasons, pilots would make a lot of sense. They would enable the final legislation to iron out many of these issues and to work much more effectively.

What really bothers me is the inflexibility around this, which is driving this legislation. There is a sense that the Government are saying, “We must get this through. We can’t have any deviations or amendments. We mustn’t listen to this; it is all a plot to derail this great reform”. I am sorry but that is not true. There are many of us in this House who care about policing and want to make this work. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, might be surprised to hear this. If there are to be changes to policing, I want them to work. I can see some merit in what is being proposed. I do not reject it out of hand but it can be improved. That is why I support pilots. What bothers me is that I am prepared to be flexible but there is no reciprocal flexibility on the Government’s side. It worries me that the people who are driving this through want to do so with very little change. There has been some change; I see the Minister looking at me. There were changes yesterday. I welcome them and hope that there will be more. However, at the moment the message that has reached me is that there must be no deviation—that this must go through and there must be elections next year. There is a sense that this is being rushed through.

These changes are the most sweeping changes to policing that we have seen in modern times. I am not saying that they should not happen. However, it will be a recipe for disaster if we do not get them right. Policing is too important and sensitive an area to risk courting disaster. To have a pilot—perhaps lasting not four years but two or three—and at least to trial some of these things would do our duty to those who come after us. I am worried that we will introduce things that will irreversibly change the face of policing. Since I do not believe that policing is broken, I shall take a lot of convincing that these changes will be marvellous without at least testing them first. That is why I support pilots.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, conjures up a fascinating prospect of former Home Secretaries and Secretaries of State standing for election as police and crime commissioners. Given what the Minister has told us today with regard to the bar on Members of this House standing for such positions, we can look forward to the possibility of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, becoming the elected police and crime commissioner for Kent.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I fear that in the course of this Committee I have not always been entirely helpful to the Government, so on this group of amendments I will do my very best to be as supportive as possible. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, about the choice between the supplementary vote and the alternative vote. I will not get into the merits of different voting systems as this House has already spent many happy hours doing that and the country has spent rather fewer happy hours doing the same. However, I should say that if the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, were to be passed, a further anomaly would be created for London, because the Mayor of London is elected on the supplementary vote system, while the person fulfilling police accountability in London would be elected on a different system, the alternative vote, from that in the rest of the country. I offer that in the spirit of trying to assist government Ministers in refuting arguments about amendments.

My main reason for speaking on this group is to support the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, in her Amendment 234ZZF. I suspect that this relates to something about which not a great deal of thought has been given in the drafting of the Bill, which ties the hands of an incoming MOPC in London, or an incoming policing and crime commissioner, commission or anything else outside the country. That is because the Government are saying that there is only one bite of the cherry and that the transfer of staff must take place before police authorities are abolished. That would be fine if we were talking about an extraordinarily long lead-in. It would perhaps allow time for much discussion and consultation. However, we are not talking about that.

If the Government get their way, the elections of policing and crime commissioners in the 41 areas outside London will take place next May. That presupposes that in all those areas the detailed work that the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, has described will have been concluded on time and that the Minister’s officials within the Home Office will have done it in sufficient time to provide the guidance that is spelt out in the Bill. I have, of course, enormous faith in civil servants in the Home Office, but I am conscious of the workload involved in saying exactly how this is to be done. If, as is the intention or aspiration, the arrangements change in London earlier than May 2012, it would mean doing all this work on an even shorter timescale in the largest police force in England and Wales. I am sure that everyone would do their very best to achieve it, but I am not convinced that the work would necessarily be completed in time for an order to be passed by the outgoing Metropolitan Police Authority by 30 September or any later date, if it is to go earlier than May 2012.

Even if it were possible to do this in practice, I have to ask the Government whether this is really their intention in the legislation. My understanding is that these new individuals are being created—the MOPC in London and the police and crime commissioners, or whatever we end up with, outside London in the rest of England and Wales—and you are then going to say to them, “Actually, it’s tough because all the staff you might want have been transferred already to the control of the chief officer of police”. I suspect that there will be some robust discussions about all this. There is the question of what sort of offices will be put around the MOPC and the PCCs outside London. There will be discussions as to which functions are properly the responsibilities of the MOPC or the PCC, and which functions are the responsibilities of the chief officer of police. Here is an arrangement whereby all those decisions will have been made by the time the MOPC comes into force or the elections for policing and crime commissioners—if there are any elections—have taken place in the rest of the country. I suspect that that is not what the Government want, and that any person elected as a police and crime commissioner outside London would want to make an assessment of the most appropriate balance to be struck and how that is to be done. At the moment, there is no provision to allow that to happen.

This simple amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, allows there to be, if necessary, a two-stage process. If in fact it is all terribly easy—if the difficulties I have identified do not exist, which I doubt, and it is obvious that all the differing candidates for police and crime commissioners in any locality are of the same mind as to exactly what office they want around them and it goes without saying that the Conservative Party candidate, the Labour Party candidate, and the Liberal Democrat candidate will have exactly the same vision of the shape of the office that they want to have around them in the PCC—it will be fine. In reality, I suspect that the Government are tying the hands of those in the new structures that they want to be so effective before they are even created.

That is why this simple amendment, which allows, if necessary, for a two-stage process or a staged process is extremely sensible.

[Baroness Henig]

I shall speak to Amendment 200A in this group, concerned with the Bill's proposal to grant the Secretary of State power to create criminal offences to regulate the conduct of elections for police and crime commissioners and any related irregularities. I have to observe that this is a diverse group. There seem to be a number of distinct issues contained in it. My amendment would, by removing the unfettered power of the Secretary of State to create new criminal offences, ensure that the power is exercised appropriately. By that, I mean by your Lordships' House and the other place. Although there may well be a need to create new criminal offences as a result of the Government’s proposed creation of a whole new set of elections and the novel introduction of direct rather than representative democracy as part of a reform package costing more than £100 million, such important steps should not be the preserve of statutes but should come before Parliament.

In this Session, we are following the lengthy debate on the Public Bodies Bill, perhaps in danger of exhausting the utility of the term “Henry VIII clause”, denoting the granting of open-ended powers to a Secretary of State in statute. With appropriate respect to His Majesty's memory, I fear that I must raise the not insubstantial spectre of that monarch before your Lordships yet again. Any proposal to grant the Secretary of State unfettered powers to create new criminal offences at whim in any area will strike many of your Lordships as, at the very least, inappropriate. However, when the power to create new offences is applied to procedures governing the people's exercise of their democratic mandate, such a new power might strike some of democracy’s most ardent defenders as a little chilling.

If new offences are to be created to regulate the brave new world of directly elected police and crime commissioners, surely those offences should be appropriately scrutinised and considered by Parliament.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig]

I thank the Minister very much for her very lengthy response. I also thank everyone who took part in the debate. The intention of the amendments was very much to start off a debate on these issues. I thought that the many points to which the Minister has just referred needed to be explored in debate. There has been an extremely full and good debate on a whole range of issues. Perhaps I may mention one or two of them.

The first issue is the composition of the panels. I feel the same way about the composition of the police and crime panels as I do about the composition of the House of Lords—I believe that composition should follow function. The composition of the panels should, in a sense, follow the functions of the panels, and I accept that I am trying to change those functions. I am trying to get the panels to have a more collaborative role. I do not want them just to be scrutinising the commissioner because I think that that would be a total waste of the panel members’ expertise. I am therefore trying to change the role. I am also suggesting that if the role should be more one of collaboration and getting involved in local policing, the composition will need to follow that. It will need to be somewhat more cohesive and to be balanced in the sorts of ways that I have mentioned. If the commission’s only function is to scrutinise the commissioner, which was the original model, then there is a greater case to be made that everybody should be included in this scrutiny exercise. But if that is all that the panels are going to do, it will be a complete waste of local talent.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

Given that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has been telling us how, as a substitute for involvement in crime and disorder reduction partnerships, local authorities will be represented on the police and crime panels, does that not suggest that this is not just about scrutiny but about a much more important role? Therefore, all the noble Baroness’s points are even stronger.

[Baroness Henig]

I was going on to say that I remain absolutely convinced that political balance is essential. The political balance on police authorities at the moment—I lost the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, at one point—is established by the votes cast at the previous general election. That is the basis on which the composition of police authorities exists. It has worked extremely well for the past 15 years, and I see no reason why we should depart from that. In a sense, it is not that we want to keep police authorities in existence. That suspicion was voiced by the Minister, but that is not the issue. The issue is that we want to build on existing good practice. There are things that have worked very well in the past 15 years, and it seems stupid to throw them away. That is what we are trying to argue. The political balance of police authorities over the past 15 years was one of the positive changes that took place. To throw that away and to return to politicisation as we had it in the 1970s and 1980s is something that some of us want to avoid at all costs. That is one of the points about political balance.

The second point is about independent members. In the past 15 years, we have seen how effective independent members have been on police authorities. We know that two will not be sufficient. We know that you need diversity, gender balance and geographic balance. My suggestion of five or six independent members was intended to build on good practice. That is what I was trying to do in some of these amendments. It goes without saying that these independents would be appointed on Nolan principles. That has been established in the past few years, and I think it would continue.

On the other place sending us legislation, I have read all the debates. MPs came up with problems similar to those that we have been wrestling with here, and I have to tell the Minister that on more than one occasion people not just on the opposition side but also on the government side commented that they hoped that the Lords would be able to amend the legislation to meet the point. That was said more than once in the Committee stage in the other place and it is precisely what we are trying to do. We are trying to do what the other place suggested when it came up with problems. We are trying to find solutions, and that is running headlong into what the Minister confessed right at the outset—that there would be no changes to the overall structure of the Bill—and that is where we have problems. There is tension between no changes on the one hand and people in the other place knowing that there are serious flaws in the legislation and hoping somehow that the Lords will find a way to deal with them. We are trying to deal with these issues.

This was a probing amendment. I do not claim to have all the answers, but we have to try to meet some of these points. There are serious problems to be dealt with in this legislation, and that is what I think many of the amendments are trying to address—not in any hostile way, but simply to try to improve the legislation. If there are going to be no changes to the overall structure of the Bill—we will come back to that at the end—that will give us problems. However, at this point I will withdraw my amendment, but I shall feel free possibly to bring it back at a later stage.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Henig

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the Minister has given a very helpful explanation in relation to the chief financial officer. I do not think anyone is suggesting that the chief officer of police should not have financial support from somebody who was suitably qualified. It is told, no doubt apocryphally, that the Metropolitan Police, when it was under the control of the Home Office, had only two qualified accountants responsible for a budget of £3 billion, which may have explained why it did not have a system for knowing whether it had paid bills more than once. Having a senior financial person who is a qualified accountant is not the same as having a chief finance officer, which has a specific meaning in local government law. It is clear that the post is intended to have that specific meaning in local government law. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that we should move away from the situation that exists at the moment, where every force has a senior finance person, but the person who is clearly responsible for accounts and everything else resides within the police authority or, in this case given the Government’s construct, with the police and crime commissioner.

[Baroness Henig]

It has been an extremely interesting debate which has teased out a number of important issues, many of which I am sure we will come back to. I am most grateful to the Minister for her response and for telling us that the Government will bring forward an amendment in relation to some of the issues. I am sure that we will have further debate at that point simply because so many important, technical issues relating to where the balance of power lies in different situations are still to be clarified. Given that we shall come back to a number of them, and given the important assurances that the Minister has provided, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.